british columbia magazine

41British ColumBia magazine • spring 2011

science

dinosaur detectives

by daniel wood photography michael bednar

Following a series of big finds near Tumbler Ridge,

residents and scientists are exploring the Age of Dinosaurs,

a story told in bone and fossils.

on this early July morning in 2010 there’s little evidence of what happened here 75 million years ago. Today, the cumulous to the west are suspended over the summits of the

Northern Rockies. No river otters, no beaver today on this shallow creek as it meanders amid the pine-covered foothills near Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. Except for the sound of the mountain stream—interrupted on occasion by the muttering of an air compressor—all is quiet. There are, as well, no dinosaurs today. But roll the scene back to the Upper Cretaceous, back toward the dramatic end to the Age of Dinosaurs, and the story of what once happened here takes shape.

Amid the sledgehammers and green plastic sheeting, 20 metres across the creek from where I sit,

two tanned and kneepad-clad women are bent into a 14-metre-wide bluffside quarry. “Tyrannosaur tooth!” shouts Lisa Buckley, 32, to her paleontological partner (and husband) Rich McCrea, who is seated with me on a sandbar, explaining what he and his two associates are doing. The team is extracting the first complete dinosaur ever found in British Columbia, a 10-metre long creature that appears, from the broken knife-like teeth they keep unearthing amid the fossil bones, to have served as a meal for some local tyrannosaurs.

The circumstances that brought McCrea, 42, to this spot are unusual. Ten years prior, he was studying the dinosaur trackways that are occasionally found in the shelving, sedimentary rocks of the Peace River region when he received a phone call from eight-year-old Daniel Helm. The boy explained

that while inner tube rafting on the shallow Flatbed Creek near Tumbler Ridge, he and an 11-year-old companion, Mark Turner, had found what they believed to be a series of dinosaur footprints. Daniel’s father, Charles Helm, was sceptical. Still, he contacted renowned dinosaur expert Phil Currie, who suggested calling McCrea to assist in the identification.

A year after the boys’ initial find, McCrea arrived on site and identifed the footprints as belonging to a cow-sized, four-legged, armoured-plated ankylosaur. Over the course of investigating the site during the next few days, he made another important discovery. This, he said at the time, pointing in surprise at his feet, is dinosaur bone. It was the first scientifically confirmed dinosaur bone found in B.C.

• Paleontologists rich mccrea and lisa buckley carefully exhume the remains of the first complete dinosaur ever found in b.c. The 10-metre- long creature, which mccrea discovered in 2009, is most likely a crested lambeosaur.

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42 British ColumBia magazine • spring 2011 43British ColumBia magazine • spring 2011

science

in the years that followed, mcCrea, Charles and Daniel helm, and an ever-growing coterie of amateur fossil hunters explored the exposed beds of tumbler ridge-area creeks, and the cliff-faces of nearby mountains, and regularly found evidence of prehistoric life. in fact, besides the dinosaur bone, there were a total of 26 dinner plate-sized footprints along Flatbed Creek, more ankylosaur prints, and a bunch of three-toed prints of theropod dinosaurs along the Wolverine river. there were also hundreds more prehistoric footprints along other streams in the area. there were incredible triassic fish fossils above Wapiti lake. and there were fossilized leaf prints, clams, tree trunks, and pine cones everywhere.

the timing of these discoveries couldn’t have been better for tumbler ridge. the town had been built in the

early 1980s to service two massive coal mines located nearby. When prices collapsed 20 years later and the mines closed and hundreds of workers were laid off, a three-bedroom house could be bought there for $25,000. people found themselves asking: could tumbler ridge reinvent itself as a tourist destination? For where there’s a lot of Cretaceous coal, there are often a lot of fossils. Could the boys’ initial dinosaur discovery help rescue the town?

i majored in geology and have long been interested in the age of Dinosaurs. Few know more about it than Currie, an albertan paleontologist who has spent half his life digging in the eroded, dinosaur-rich badlands outside Drumheller, located just over 900 kilometres southeast of tumbler ridge. During the upper Cretaceous geologic period (97- to

65-million years ago) a vast sea covered much of western north america. Western alberta and eastern B.C. were on the continent’s coast then, its climate resembling Florida today. the rocky mountains didn’t exist. much of B.C. was part of a land mass that extended from alaska down into the western u.s. along the low-lying shoreline of this inland sea, swamps, estuaries, and subtropical forests provided, Currie explains, a perfect habitat for numerous plant-eating

dinosaurs and their agile nemesis: the predatory tyrannosaurs. tens of millions of years passed. in time, some of the decaying vegetation became coal. and, given the right circumstances, the dinosaur trackways were buried intact, and the mineralized dinosaur bones preserved.

this background served me well when later, at his field camp, located a couple of kilometres from the dinosaur quarry, mcCrea showed me a colour-coded stratigraphic map on his laptop that depicted the region’s geology. “i’m looking for dinosaur bones in this

formation,” he said, pointing to the orange-keyed, upper Cretaceous formations in the peace river area. “the paleo-environment then was forested river sediments and bogs—conifers with one-metre trunks, freshwater fish, tyrannosaurs, hadrosaurs, Velociraptor-like dinosaurs, and early crocodiles.”

in 2007, he’d walked downstream along the wide valley where the quarry is now located, his eyes scanning the creek’s shelving sandstone banks and eroded bluffs, banded with tell-tale seams of coal. But it wasn’t until 2009, on a later excursion, that he saw a piece of dinosaur tailbone, then more fossilized vertebrae spilling out of a cliff a few metres above the water. it was clear that the rest of the animal, if it existed, lay beneath the tailbone, under five metres of siltstone.

they needed to find out what was under that rock. it took months of digging in the year that followed for the scientists and local volunteers, the helms included, to ascertain what exactly the tail was connected to. the team excavated a five metre-high and 14 metre-long quarry above the fossil. “We broke more rock than a bunch of convicts,” says mcCrea of those months. “there are no ivory tower academics among field paleontologists.”

mcCrea, Buckley, and their field technician, tammy pigeon, worked from the exposed tail toward the still entombed head. By early summer 2010, when i arrived, they had come to believe that what they had was one of the large, plant-eating, duck-billed dinosaurs known as hadrosaurs. it was one of the more common creatures during the last days of the dinosaurs. But its exact identity wasn’t certain—it could be a crested hadrosaur (known as lambeosaurine, or a lambeosaur) or a non-crested hadrosaur (known as hadrosaurine). the tail section—a half-tonne

on a later excursion in

2009, mccrea saw a

piece of dinosaur

tailbone, then more

fossilized vertebrae

spilling out of a cliff.

• The dinosaurs seen here lived during the late cretaceous period, 83-to 85-million years ago.

John siBBiCk/national geographiC stoCk

• The murray river plunges 60 metres over Kinuseo Falls, one of scores of cataracts that punctuate the landscape in the Tumbler ridge area.


science

• daniel helm and his father, charles helm, examine dinosaur footprints by lantern light along the wolverine river.


block encased in its plaster jacket—had already been removed from the quarry in the team’s strange, eight-wheeled amphibious atV. that piece, like the rest that will follow in time, will undergo years of tedious preparatory work in their tumbler ridge museum-laboratory. as we ford the icy creek that July day and join the two women digging in the quarry, mcCrea explains that what remains buried will reveal details that might refine their original identification.

the late morning sun moves from behind the creekside pine and aspen, revealing the big, doughnut-shaped vertebrae, the ribs, and heavy pelvic bones of the ironstone-encased creature. the day is warm, and the quarry, soon, hot. i find an uncomfortable nook amid buckets, trowels, whisk brooms, dustpans, snaking air compressor hoses, sledgehammers, crowbars, and broken rubble, duck the occasional avalanche of loose rock and coal from higher up the quarry wall, and remind myself that had i been better at chemistry in university i might be joining my three companions in their work.

mcCrea, in bandana, orange goggles, and a dinosaur-footprinted t-shirt, uses a two-kilogram sledgehammer and a big awl to expose a thoracic rib. Buckley is leaning over the ischium, a pelvic bone that may assist in the identification of the creature. its tapered shape might provide more clues. and pigeon, who has just announced that she, too, has struck a piece of tyrannosaur tooth, lies prone in the pit, head down, goggles on, using a compressor-driven, pen-sized, micro-jackhammer called an air-scribe to free the fragment of tooth from its rock matrix. Flecks of rock fly. the tiny device whines. mosquitoes buzz.

Buckley, kneeling and bent double nearby, joins in with her own drilling and dust. hours pass. the afternoon sun creates shimmering heat waves in the valley beyond. When i ask pigeon, “how’s it going?” she glances up momentarily, sweat and dust now streaked on her face, and replies, “nerve-wracking,” before returning to her meticulous task. it’s like watching someone dig a hole with a pin. i realize then, for the first time, how fortunate i was to have flunked chemistry all those years ago.

By late afternoon, Buckley has exposed enough of the dinosaur’s distinctive ischium bone for mcCrea and Buckley to declare the creature is not hadrosaurine, but is most likely the crested lambeosaur. the pervasiveness of broken teeth nearby—three found that day—suggest the animal had been eaten by one, if not several, scavenging tyrannosaurs, he adds. “We shouldn’t care if it’s hadrosaurine or a crested lambeosaur,” Buckley says. “But if it is a lambeosaur, it’s more sexy.”

this “sexiness” derives, it seems, from the fact that one type of lambeosaur had a strange, bony, battle-axe-shaped

head ornamentation that juts upward and backward from its skull and which scientists theorize may have aided communication.

on the hike back upriver toward his field camp that evening, mcCrea explains that it’s rare in paleontology to find a complete dinosaur skeleton. the vast majority are

fragmentary. erosion, decay, and predation mitigate against a dead creature remaining intact. after six months of digging, mcCrea is pretty confident, but not absolutely certain, that it’s a crested lambeosaur.

the following day, Charles helm and his son volunteer to revisit the occasion at the bottom of Flatbed Creek where Daniel and his young friend first spotted the dinosaur trackway a decade earlier. We sit in the forested canyon just outside tumbler

ridge where the stream sluices between boulders and across half-submerged ledges and Daniel, now a lanky university student, describes the series of childhood events that led to his rushing back to his father that day, shouting, “Dinosaur tracks! Dinosaur tracks!” Daniel stands, then—as he tells the story—mimicks his father looking down at the series of gigantic, evenly-spaced, curiously-toed holes, and assumes his father’s doubtful, arching voice from that day: “Wellllll . . . i dunno.” the two laugh at the oft-told tale.

“i’ll never live it down,” Charles says, and his son nods in agreement.

it’s like watching

someone dig a hole with

a pin. i realize then, for

the first time, how

fortunate i was to have

flunked chemistry all

those years ago.

science

• Paleontologist lisa buckley, standing, and technical assistant Tammy Pigeon painstakingly map out where the fossils were found.

• lisa buckley holds the tooth of an albertasaurus found in the Tumbler ridge area.


the rest, as they say, is history. the sceptical father phones the famous dinosaur authority, phil Currie. Currie suggests contacting mcCrea. Daniel phones mcCrea, who later visits the site, identifies the tracks, spots the nearby dinosaur bone, and wonders if there are more. together, local dinosaur enthusiasts search the canyons around tumbler ridge and find, in fact, 23 more trackways, some with hundreds, and one with at least 1,000 dinosaur footprints near the town of hudson’s hope. mcCrea then locates the lambeosaur site. local politicians, watching the coal mines close and the real estate market collapse, realize the newfound dinosaurs may allow the district to reinvent itself. an empty school becomes a dinosaur museum, run by Buckley and mcCrea. and the tumbler ridge area becomes known for dinosaurs.

at the Flatbed Creek trackway site, Daniel wades the stream as i watch, stands against the canyon’s far wall, sets his feet into the first set of dinosaur footprints over there, sets his hands into the next set, and assumes the posture of

a four-legged ankylosaur as he clumsily crosses the sloping sandstone ledge, footstep by footstep, until the tracks disappear into the rushing water. in the gap between the young man and the actual dinosaur: 93 million years. the rocky mountains rose during that time. British Columbia formed. most dinosaurs died. the ones that didn’t became birds. the age of Dinosaurs ended.

“soon, they’ll all be gone,” says Daniel, shouting over the sound of water, and pointing down to where many of the footprints have already begun eroding away. time, like the water in Flatbed Creek, flows on, slowly erasing most evidence of the past.

Epilogue: In August, 2010, McCrea called an end to his third year of digging at the remote lambeosaur site. By his estimate, it will take two more years for the entire dinosaur fossil to be removed. The following month, while scouting valleys nearby, he and Buckley, found evidence of several more dinosaurs.

Tumbler Ridge is a district of just over 2,400 permanent residents located 1,200 km northeast of Vancouver in B.C.’s Peace River region. There are four daily Air Canada flights from Vancouver to Fort St. John, which lies about 200 km north of Tumbler Ridge.

• investigate the dinosaur trackways located along the shelving banks of Flatbed and Wolverine creeks. The dinosaur footprints are best seen at night by taking an organized lantern tour run by the Peace Region Palaeontology Research Centre (250-242-3466 www.trmf.ca/dinosaurtrackwaystour.html).

• Visit the Peace region Palaeontology research centre, which houses displays about dinosaur finds and the 90-million year old trackways of the region. (250-242-3466; www.prprc.com).

• send the kids to dinosaur camp (ages eight to 13). Summer sessions focus on field palaeontology and the town’s dinosaur museum.

• wander amid the moonscape of the Boulder Gardens, about 35 km

south of Tumbler Ridge, where bizarre stone pinnacles and massive, rocky rubble-fields dot the mountainside.

• explore the region’s backcountry—fishing, kayaking, hiking, fossil-hunting, mountain climbing—with Ridge Rotors, a Tumbler Ridge-based helicopter service (www.ridgerotors.com).

• collect waterfall sightings by heading to 60-metre high Kinuseo Falls, 100-metre high Bergeron Falls, or some of the scores of other cataracts that punctuate the landscape.

The town has four hotels, two bed and breakfasts, and a half-dozen restaurants.

• Peace region Palaeontology research centre (250-242-3466; www.prprc.com).

• Tumbler ridge Visitor centre (250-242-3123, 877- SAW-DINO ; www.tumblerridge.ca).

• Daniel’s Dinosaurs: A True Story of Discovery by Charles Helm (Maple Tree Press, 2004).

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• dinosaur skeletons appear to run along a trackway at the Peace region Palaeontological research centre, where visitors can learn about the area’s rich geological history.

opposite: a closeup of one of the dinosaur prints found along the wolverine river.

web exTras bcmag.caWhat’s inside Rich McCrea’s tool bag? Click STORIES and search “Tools of the trade.”

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